The running man

“There is a major but very difficult realization that needs to be reached about [Cary] Grant—difficult, that is, for many people who like to think they take the art of film seriously,” David Thomson writes in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, before going on to make a persuasive argument that Grant “was the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema.” There’s a similarly difficult realization that needs to be reached about Tom Cruise, which is that for better or worse, over the last quarter of a century, he’s been the best movie star we have, and one of the best we’ve ever had. Not the best actor, certainly, or even the one, like Clooney, who most embodies our ideas of what a star should be, but simply the one who gave us the most good reasons to go to the movies for more than twenty years. I love film deeply, and I’ve thought about it more than any sane person probably should, and I have no trouble confessing that for most of my adult life, Cruise and his movies have given me more pleasure than the work of any other actor or director.

And yet it wasn’t until I realized that I loved his movies that I really started to take notice of him in his own right. We’re usually drawn to stars because of the qualities they embody, but in Cruise’s case, I became a fan—and remain a huge one—because I belatedly noticed that whenever I bought a ticket to a movie with his name above the title, I generally had a hell of a good time. That hasn’t always been true in recent years, and while some might say that his movies have taken a hit because Cruise’s own public image has been tarnished, I’d argue that the causal arrow runs the other way. Cruise has always functioned less as a traditional movie star than as a sort of seal of quality: a guarantee that we’ll be treated to a film that provides everything that the money, talent, and resources of a major studio can deliver. As a result, whenever the movies in which he appears become less interesting, Cruise himself grows less attractive. Left to his own devices, he can’t rescue Lions for Lambs or Knight and Day, but if he gives us a big, impersonal toy like Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, all is forgiven.

It’s worth emphasizing how strange this is. We tend to think of movie stars as supernatural beings who can elevate mediocre material by their mere presence, but Cruise is more of a handsome, professional void, a running man around whom good to great movies have assembled themselves with remarkable consistency. In fact, he’s more of a great producer and packager of talent who happens to occupy the body of a star who can also get movies made. Hollywood consists of many ascending circles of power, in which each level has more of it than the one below, but when judged by its only real measure—the ability to give a film a green light—true power has traditionally resided with a handful of major stars. What sets Cruise apart from the rest is that he’s used his stardom to work with many of the great filmmakers of his time (Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola, Mann, Stone, De Palma, Anderson) and a host of inspired journeymen, and he’s been largely responsible for the ascent of such talents as J.J. Abrams and Brad Bird. If this sort of thing were easy, we’d see it more often. And the fact that he did it for more than two decades speaks volumes about his intelligence, shrewdness, and ambition.

Recently, he’s faltered a bit, but his choices, good or bad, are still fascinating, especially as his aura continues to enrich his material with memories of his earlier roles, a process that goes at least as far back as Eyes Wide Shut. I haven’t seen Oblivion, but over the weekend, I caught Jack Reacher, a nifty but profoundly odd and implausible genre movie that runs off Cruise like a battery. (It’s actually much more of a star vehicle than Ghost Protocol, in which Cruise himself tended to get lost among all the wonders on display.) While most leading men strive to make it all seem easy, much of the appeal of watching Cruise lies in how hard this boy wonder of fifty seems to push himself in every frame, as if he still has everything to prove. Other stars may embody wit, cool, elegance, or masculinity, but Cruise is the emblem of the man who wills himself into existence, both on and off the screen, and sustains the world around him through sheer focus and energy. Real or not, it’s a seductive vision, or illusion, for those of us blessed with less certainty. As Taffy Brodesser-Akner says this week in The New York Times Magazine: “Who has ever worked so hard for our pleasure?”